FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Chapter 49: Concerning Fairies,
or,
More than You Probably Wanted to Know about Fairies


Wednesday, January 16. Early afternoon.

Charlie was in the forest, mounted on his broom. He was halfway up a snow-covered pine tree, circling it, trying to pinpoint the high-pitched twittering coming from deep within its branches. Far off, he heard some of his classmates moving around on the forest floor, occasionally snapping twigs or just talking too loudly. He cringed, embarrassed on their behalf.

The schedules of upper-level Care of Magical Creatures classes included a multi-hour block once a week, which Kettleburn insisted upon for the sake of "field experience" and "practical exercises". Often, especially in the winter, he didn't use it, but he had plans for today's class.

Fairies were the source of the high-pitched twittering, and Charlie was only able to hear them so clearly because of a modified sense-augmenting charm. In past years, as best as Charlie knew, Kettleburn had saved the fairy unit for later in the year. Eeles had just covered sense-augmenting charms, though, in response to the basilisk crisis, so maybe Kettleburn wanted to take advantage of somebody else covering his material for him.

The class had, by seventh year, spent a lot of time collecting specimens around the castle grounds, so they knew their professor's safety speech by heart: stick to non-damaging spells, only use approved containers, don't disturb other wildlife, and so on. "Safety" here meant that of the magical creatures, of course—not, as Madam Pomfrey was so fond of pointing out, the students.

They were allowed to use brooms. Most didn't. The fact that Charlie consistently came back with more and better specimens than his classmates never seemed to really register with them. The one time he had asked, he was told "oh, you'd still do better than us without your broom, so what difference does it make?" Trying to argue with that kind of thinking gave Charlie a headache.

Selecting a spot, he carefully nosed his broom into a space between the branches, trying not to cause too much of an avalanche in the process. It was a grey day out, and snow was expected later, but overall the forest was suffused with white light as the extensive snow-cover reflected nearly everything that made it through the clouds. Moving from that to the dark center of the pine tree meant that Charlie had to wait a minute for his eyes to adjust once he had pushed his way in.

There was a hole in the trunk in front of him, about four inches wide, dripping resin at its base. The fairies' twittering had cut off abruptly at the sound of falling snow, but they were still luminescent enough that a faint glow came out of their hole and gave them away. Charlie edged up to it, trying not to make any further noise. He knew the twittering was unlikely to resume with him there—they could probably smell him or sense him in some other, magical way. But he waited a little while anyway before quietly withdrawing a bag from his robes. It contained a collection jar.

The jar was a magically-expandable glass container with a mouth that could be warded shut with a word or wand-tap—standard equipment for all five years of Kettleburn's class. Charlie took it out of the bag, adjusted it until it was about the size of a gallon jug, then held it in position over the hole. Sticking the end of his wand in between the trunk and the jar, he cast the spell he and Hagrid had carefully refrained from teaching the twins.

Three thrashing tangles of limbs and wings came flying out of the hole and into the jar, accompanied by tiny screeches and angry twittering. Charlie set the jar to 'closed', and a shimmering mesh covered the mouth. Air could get in, but the fairies couldn't get out. Hopefully. Still, better safe than sorry—the trouble with magical creatures is that they tended to have magic to defend themselves, and fairies were pretty far from Charlie's areas of expertise (they were small and not terribly dangerous). He quickly slid the bag over the jar and pulled its drawstring closed. That ought to keep them.

Charlie found Kettleburn down by the lake. Next to him, on a boulder, he had a large wire cage that looked more appropriate for a parrot than fairies. It was, so far, empty.

"I got three!"

"Good show!" Kettleburn beamed, and opened the door. "Just slip them in here. I'm sure the others will be along shortly!"

Charlie wasn't going to insult the old professor by asking if the cage was really charmed to keep the fairies from escaping, even though he'd seen that sort of thing happen dozens of times in this class by now. He'd find out soon enough—it was fairly quick work to get the bag open and release the wards on the jar mouth. The fairies could be trusted to dart into the larger space immediately, eager to get out of the jar if not escape entirely. Charlie got the door shut on them before they could catch their bearings. They flew up and twittered angrily at him, and one of them gripped the bars of the cage while making rude faces, but none tried to slip through and come after him.

"Oh look at that—they certianly look vexed at you, don't they? Come off it you!" Kettleburn shook his head, knowingly. "They just like the attention, you know."

Charlie was finally able to get a good look at them. They looked just like attractive humans—two males, one female—, except for being around six inches high, luminescent, and able to fly under their own power. Their wings were like a dragonfly's—two pairs, each as long as the fairy was tall, transparent and crisscrossed by an intricate network of veins. In flight, the wings were a noisy blur; at rest, they looked impossibly delicate, and wholly incapable of lifting their owners without magic. Charlie was surprised by one other thing, too.

"So," he asked, "when Professor Flitwick uses them for decorations, are they these same fairies?"

"Hmm." Kettleburn leaned in close and peered at them. "Yes, yes, it's a great indignity, I know. Well, that one there—he's still pretty young—you can still see the lines left over from his metamorphosis. Filius usually leaves those alone. But the other two look old enough, so maybe."

"So he takes them from the forest?"

"Oh yes, there are plenty—why not? It's exciting and lets them feel useful."

"What?" Charlie grinned. "They're no use in the woods? Sorry. What I actually meant to ask was, you know, whenever I've seen them before, they were wearing clothes."

"Oh! That's all Filius. Conjures little robes and such for them—they love that sort of thing, but of course they can never take care of them once he lets them go. Fairies aren't much for mending tears or doing laundry, you know. Not much call for that in the forest."

"Did somebody object to seeing them like this?"

Kettleburn looked thoughtful. "You'd have to ask Professor Flitwick yourself, of course, but I suspect he just thinks it looks pretty. You agree with him, right?" This last was directed at the fairies themselves, who cocked their little heads at Kettleburn, as if puzzled.

Charlie was used to his professor talking as if everything understood him, but this seemed a bit much. "You sound as if they can understand you . . . unusually well." There, that was diplomatic, right?

"Oh, naturally!" Kettleburn almost managed a Dumbledorish eye-twinkle there for a moment. "Almost all creatures will respond if you speak to them kindly. They all have their own sorts of intelligences—you should know that by now."

"But, if fairies were that intelligent, surely wizards wouldn't—you know—I mean, my mum—"

"Charlie! That's enough of that. Yes, sadly some wizards lack respect for other species, but you don't need to bring it up in front of them."

Now the fairies were looking back and forth between the two humans, occasionally twittering to each other. The problem, of course, was that wizards used fairies for all sorts of things. Like, say, potion ingredients, or soup. Charlie's mother had an excellent fairie-dust soup, and the twins had spent more detentions than they could count grinding dried fairy wings in a mortar and pestle for Snape. Wizards raised fairies commercially—that was one of the main reasons they were in the textbook!

Charlie struggled with what to say. "But, most of the chapter in the book—"

"Fairies can't read." That wasn't very enlightening, but Charlie decided to drop it. "Okay, Charlie, it looks like your classmates are having some trouble. I want to have at least ninety minutes of time in the classroom after this—go give them a hand."

"How many more do you want?"

"Oh, I don't know—you decide. Just find us few more, if you're able, and show the others how to do it. Go on!"


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Twenty minutes later the class was getting settled into their seats. The cage was sitting on the table at the front of the class, and contained seven fairies, all caught by Charlie. These were either hovering in place or clinging to the bars, regarding the class curiously. Everything else on the table, whatever it was, was covered by a large piece of canvas; Kettleburn sometimes hid things to keep the students' attention focused on himself.

"Well then," said Kettleburn, "now that you have caught us some samples to look at, let's get started. Who can explain why fairies can't speak English?"

The textbook mostly covered things like how to get fairies to breed in captivity, what to feed them, and so on, but the class was quite used to Kettleburn going off on tangents by now. A boy from the back of the room raised his hand and was called on. "Language is innate to intelligent beings, and the fairies just don't have whatever it is that we do?"

"Hm, that wasn't very precise, but I think you're on the wrong track. What exactly do you think you were listening for today with that hearing charm?"

"Vibrations of their wings?"

"Partially. What else?"

"Uh, whatever other sounds they make?"

"So far, so good—fairies have larynges just like you and I. Nearly all warm-blooded animals have something analogous, and can produce vocalizations to communicate with one another." He looked around the classroom for someone to elaborate, but the boy protested.

"But that's just like grunts and barks and stuff, right?"

"For some creatures. Not for you. And not for the fairies. Do the reading next time." Kettleburn called on a girl at the back of the room.

"They use a combination of vocalizations and wing vibrations."

"Right. And so they can't learn English . . ."

"Because they can't produce the sounds?" Kettleburn was nodding. "So you are saying they could learn it if they had the right anatomy?"

"Not necessarily very well, but I suspect so, yes. I was trying to get you to think about the hearing charm. Hm. One last question on this topic, then, although I don't expect any of you to know this. Extra credit: why are their voices so high?"

Another girl answered. "Because they are really tiny?"

"And?" Kettleburn stared at her. She looked lost.

Charlie hated this kind of thing. He tried not to answer questions in class, since he usually knew all the answers, and Kettleburn knew Charlie was the only one who knew all the answers, but he would ask these difficult things to the class anyway. Then Kettleburn would give them so long to answer that Charlie couldn't stand it any longer, and he would come to everyone's rescue just to make Kettleburn move on. It was uncomfortably obvious to Charlie—and to his classmates—what was going on, but for the past four and a half years Kettleburn had acted like he didn't notice or mind that one student was doing most of the talking.

Well, Kettleburn was stuck in waiting mode again. Time to rescue the class for the zillionth time. Damn it.

"Yes, Charlie?"

"Their wings vibrate very quickly, for one thing—you can't even see them when they're flying. Magic lets them rely on the upper set of wings for flight and the lower set for communication, so I guess they can't talk and fly at top speed?" Kettleburn nodded, smiling. "And—like she said—their vocal tracts are really tiny, but they are otherwise like ours, right? I think the detail you wanted was that even their lowest resonant pitch is going to have a wavelength so short we can barely hear it—like a centimeter or something—I don't know what that is in terms of pitch, but since they are so much like humans it's proportional, and we wouldn't be able to hear it without the spell."

"Precisely! Ten points to Gryffindor!"

Charlie dearly wanted to make some comment about how unfair it was to expect wizards to know all that, but that kind of argument didn't work any better with Kettleburn than it did with Snape. The rest of the class would just take it as him being arrogant or patronizing to them, anyway.

"So," continued Kettleburn, "do any of you know what this is?" He pulled from his pockets something that looked like a set of pan-pipes had been dipped in glue and rolled aimlessly in a bowl of slide whistles. The fairies in the cage were all watching the old professor very intently.

"What, none of you? You don't have any eccentric great aunts who sit around in the garden for hours on end, talking to the fairies? When I first started teaching, there would always be a few students who recognized a fairy whistle. Once in a while I'd even have a muggleborn student who had run across one—no respect for the Statute of Secrecy, fairies. Half of Britain believes in them anyway, so the Ministry doesn't even bother covering for them. Cheeky little things come and go as they please, don't you? So, this monstrosity—you probably want to know what it sounds like. Hm. Let's see . . ." He carefully arranged his fingers on the instrument, raised it to his mouth, and produced a sound remarkably like the fairy twittering, if a little slower. The fairies seemed to be laughing now—Charlie was sure of it once one of them moved its hands to its mouth in an imitation of Kettleburn, then pointed at him and twittered.

Kettleburn showed a flash of embarrassment, which he quickly hid. "I'm afraid I speak with a bit of an accent. Devilishly hard to learn, fairy whistles, and most wizards don't see the point. Thus it has traditionally been the province of the truly obsessive." A girl in the back raised her hand. "Yes?"

"If they have an actual language, why can't you use a translation spell?"

"Ah, well, first of all, you're right that you can't—it's much easier to learn to understand them and then teach them to understand you, than to spend countless hours squeaking at them while they laugh at you." He paused while some of the class giggled. "So, no, no one has bothered to invent a translation spell that would work. Fairy communication isn't quite as complicated as human speech in terms of syntax and vocabulary and so on, so it's hard to convey our ideas to them. Assuming you can get them to listen at all, that is." The last was directed at the fairies, who made faces in response.

Charlie noticed one of the fairies was in fact sticking her tongue out at the teacher. He looked around the room. Some of the other students—mostly those raised in wizard households, and those who had actually done the reading—were frowning. Charlie wondered if this whole routine was Kettleburn's way of gradually changing the minds of everyone who had grown up eating fairy-dust soup. Kettleburn obviously believed the fairies understood him, at least when speaking English, even if the class was still skeptical. Okay, maybe a few muggleborn girls were hanging on his every word—they obviously wanted to believe, too.

Kettleburn continued his explanation. "That's all aside from the fact that the acoustic differences are so enormous—it's quite a challenge! Now, you would have noticed, if anyone had eccentric old aunts anymore, that there aren't really any decent books on how to use one of these things." He waved the fairy whistle around. "Would anyone care to guess why that is?"

Silence. Charlie sighed and raised his hand. "Lack of a decent notation system?"

Kettleburn smiled. "Yes, more or less. The skill tends to be passed down one-on-one and honed by imitation. Your average bored grandmother, or eccentric Care of Magical Creatures professor,"— more giggling —"can usually make at least some progress that way. As you know, fairies get distracted easily, but they like the attention, so they'll put up with quite a bit of awful whistling in their direction." Twittering from the cage, and more stuck out tongues. "Oh, come now, you, you know it's true. You are vain enough to let Professor Flitwick play dress-up with you, so it's not like most of you would try to resist little old ladies fawning over you. Come now, I've seen you in Hogsmeade. Oh? Well, what about one of these children, then?" He pointed at the class. The twittering stopped, and the fairies actually gazed out over the class appraisingly, several of them looking pointedly at Charlie. Well, he did charm them into a jar. He was rather glad they were there in the cage, not loose and trying to get revenge.


One of the fairies turned to twitter at the professor. "Ah, yes, hm," Kettleburn muttered, "I thought you'd say that. I suppose, as they say, this charade has gone on long enough. Right then!" With that he reached over, lifted the latch on the cage, and opened the door. The fairies zipped out and started dashing around the room. They really were much faster than a snitch, Charlie thought, as he ducked out of the way. If they hadn't been hiding in their holes, he would have had a much harder time catching them!

Several of the girls shrieked and started giggling as the fairies landed in their hair—apparently the tiny creatures were quite good at identifying people who liked them, and would exploit that for all it was worth.

Kettleburn cleared his throat. "Now then. Oh, calm down, they're harmless—just stop dodging and they'll settle on your shoulders or something."

Charlie remembered the last time he had listened when Kettleburn had made similar reassurances; a fruit bat had peed on his head. At least fairies would probably know better, he suspected, so they would only do that sort of thing deliberately. Well, better not ask about it—if they really did understand English, it would only give them ideas.

"Ahem. Yes, they're very cute, but if I may have your attention once more? Excellent."

Kettleburn pulled the cloth off of the table, revealing an intricate wooden device. It was as wide as the table and twice as long. A large roll of paper was attached at one end, fed into it and across a flat surface, then trailed off out the other end. Some sort of printing device? It had twenty or thirty needle-like bits that touched down on the paper and were presumably pens. All around it were countless little levers and knobs, all labeled, if at all, with numbers or cryptic abbreviations.

"All right!" Kettleburn clapped his hands. "Come on up, gather around the table so you can see . . . good, good. Now I'm sure you can guess what this is for—"

He was interrupted by several murmured "no"s and "we can?"s, and looked disappointed.

"No? Does this help?" He pulled on a little flared, conical bit, and it came away revealing a long tube connecting it to the device. It looked like the part you talked into, off of one of Charlie's dad's old muggle telephones. "Hm? In the interest of time, I will tell you this whole thing is called a Multi-scribe, it produces a visual representation of sounds spoken into this thing here," indicating the receiver-like cone, "Hogwarts only has one of them at the moment, and it would be rather expensive to repair or replace." Kettleburn looked at the students sternly, letting this sink in.

Charlie presumed 'only has one of them' implied there used to be more so that students could get hands-on experience, but they got broken. He could just see Kettleburn holding the receiver in on hand and some unhappy creature in the other, trying to goad it into screeching or squawking or whatever . . .

A boy raised his hand. "Will this be on the exam? I mean, the textbook didn't—"

"Well, I will base part of your grade on it. But no, your N.E.W.T.s will not involve knowledge of a Multi-scribe. The textbook is representative of what the Ministry thinks you should know about fairies, and if any questions about them come up, you may safely parrot back whatever the book says and be assured of full marks for those questions." Several students looked dubious about this answer—the closer the N.E.W.T.s got, the more everyone fretted when Kettleburn went off on apparent tangents, regardless of the fact that his students had, historically, always gotten very good marks.

"Now, if you would stop worrying about the test for a moment? Good. Let's try this thing, shall we?" Kettleburn pulled the receiver out a few more feet, flipped a few switches, and adjusted some knobs, all the while giving an explanation that even Charlie barely understood. The professor, apparently satisfied, then pointed at one of the fairies. "Pignut—would you come over here and talk into this for us? Wonderful!" The fairy flew over and landed in his outstretched hand, then waited expectantly as Kettleburn flipped a slightly larger switch. The Multi-scribe whirred, maybe two dozen of the pens began twitching, and after a few jerks the paper started rolling smoothly through at a pace of several inches per second. As soon as Kettleburn held the receiver up to the fairy, she started in twittering, and the pens drew complicated patterns on the paper.

Now that she was the center of attention, Pignut began pacing back and forth on Kettleburn's palm, looking very serious and gesturing as if giving a lecture. She pulled off an excellent impression of the old professor, actually, and most of the class was laughing. Kettleburn maintained his amiable smile, although a few twitches in it suggested he really could understand the fairy and found her speech a bit embarrassing.

About a minute and many feet of paper later, he shut the machine off, cast a paper-cutting spell, and sticking-charmed the output of Pignut's speech onto part of the blackboard. Charlie recognized the bottom two thirds as a sort of spectrogram, similar to the "pictures" of bird calls in a muggle field guide he had. The top third just involved a bunch of lines, most straight.

The following fifteen minutes saw the class huddled around the blackboard, eyes glazed over as Kettleburn pointed at patterns no one else could make out while giving a thoroughly abstruse lecture about secondary wing-formants, magical sound-signature onsets, pteroalveolar coarticulation, and cross-species psychoacoustic differentials. Charlie had occasionally stood outside the door during some of Babbling's and Vector's N.E.W.T-level classes. He had felt similarly at sea, listening to those, as he did now. If the other students were waiting until later to ask Charlie to explain it to them (and some of them probably were), they were in for a disappointment.

Throughout this, Kettleburn had been facing away from them, enthusiastically pointing things out. When he finally turned around and saw the students' expressions, he stopped short.

"I suppose that was a bit much all at once, wasn't it? Don't worry, it won't be on the exam." He smiled, reassuringly, and everyone visibly relaxed. "I probably ought to go over some of the reading, though, just to be sure."

He had the class return to their seats and started in asking questions about fairy reproduction. This was probably the biggest difference between fairies and humans, and was by far the primary concern of commercial fairy breeders. Apparently fairies would only lay their eggs on the leaves of certain plants, only when the temperature was in the right range and the daylight lasted long enough, and only when any number of other circumstances were right.

After several minutes of this topic, most of the fairies were hovering around Kettleburn's head, sounding upset about something. He ignored them until they moved to block his view of the class. He stopped speaking and listened to them briefly, eyebrows raised.

He ducked under the fairies briefly, waving them away from his head. "Pignut gave me trouble about this last year, too, so I imagine it's the same thing again. I doubt she remembers it, though, so you never know. Please excuse us."

Then, standing up and looking at the fairies: "if you would stop this nonsense of talking all at once, you know, I would be more inclined to listen to you." About half the fairies shut up. "Oxeye, Thorn-apple, Snowdrop—stop that! You never have anything serious to say and you know it. Pignut, what is this about?" He listened for a full two minutes as Pignut twittered in agitation, waving her arms around and repeatedly pointing at her crotch.

"Oh, and how do you know that?" he asked.

Further twittering. Pignut had evidently said something funny, since the other fairies were laughing. Some of them turned to look at the class, scanning their faces as if looking for someone in particular. Charlie tried to look inconspicuous.

Kettleburn eventually held up his hand. "Enough! Very well. What precisely do you want me to tell them? . . . And you will all then leave me alone for the rest of the class?" He turned his gaze to the other fairies, then waited for Pignut to finish again. He waved his hands until they flew a few feet off and he could see the class again.

"If some of you were more discreet, I would not be having this problem." He pretended to look stern, or at least something approximating it. "They insist that, in matters of reproduction, everything up to the point of laying eggs is the same between humans and fairies, which is not quite true—What? Well, it's not, even if it looks that way!" He was talking to the fairies again, several of whom were eyeing each other. "I will not allow you to do that in my classroom, and that's final!" Then, to the class: "Let's see if this is acceptable. This is as direct a translation as I can manage—'the fun part is the same'." He glanced at the fairies, who twittered a bit, then nodded as if pleased, before darting back to the class to sit on the shoulders of students and fiddle with their hair.

Now that Kettleburn's original lesson plan was derailed, one of the deeply-interested muggleborn girls raised her hand, asking "how do you know their names? Did you see them all before and name them, or did you just make all that up? Sorry, I mean, name them on the spot."

Kettleburn sighed, presumably deciding he would have to finish with this tangent in order to get to anything else. "The translations are quite literal, I assure you. And yes, I have met all of these fairies before. The short answer is that I know their names because they are terrible pests who know I will pay attention to them." Laughter. "It's true! I have been dragged all around the castle grounds over the years, being forced to learn the fairy names of all manner of plants. So here we have Pignut, who was in my classroom last year, along with Snowdrop, Oxeye, Thorn-apple, Bracken, Cabbage, and Treacle-mustard."

"Ow!" shouted a boy from the back of the room. "Little bastard bit me. Ow! Owww! Stop it!" He was waving one hand around, while clutching his bleeding nose with the other.

Kettleburn took out his wand and hovered an angry fairy out of reach of the students. "Well," he said, "I have to say I side with Treacle-mustard on this one. You shouldn't laugh at anyone's name. What if it had been a hippogriff? Ten points from Ravenclaw, and go see Madam Pomfrey." Kettleburn, under the healer's instructions, never tried to treat non-critical wounds himself, due to the risk of closing skin over an infection or poison.

Charlie was still doubtful about the supposed intelligence of the fairies—he had read too many stories of "intelligent" animals turning out to be hoaxes. If you put a dog in a human body, he thought, it would be awfully hard to remember it was a dog. Charlie was trying to come up with valid intelligence tests for fairies when the boy with the bleeding nose opened the door, disrupting the silencing charm that had kept out the sounds of crowing.

"Brk-Skrawk! Bruk."

Kettleburn whipped out his wand and dashed into the hall. A moment later he was preceded back in by a loudly-protesting, hover-charmed rooster, which he stuffed into the cage while it pecked violently at his artificial hand.

"Can't waste that, can we? Let's take a poll—if I turned on all the magic-recording pens on the Multi-scribe . . . here . . . here . . . and here, and started it up, how many of you think we would see anything magical about the rooster's crowing? I'll give you a moment to think about it while I get ready." He pushed the cage right up to the Multi-scribe, pulled the receiver back out, and trained his wand on the rooster. "Okay, show of hands—who thinks we'll see something magical register? Two, four, five, six, eight . . . looks like nine. Yes Charlie?"

"Are you going to use a spell to make it crow? Because that might bias the results."

"Good point. I was going to, but I bet we can irritate this guy without it. Let's see the 'yes's again—anyone change their answer if I don't use a spell? No? And who thinks we'll just see straight lines, all the way? Three, five, hm, nine, eleven. I notice lots of you have no idea—that's okay, I don't either. Any quibbles wth my experimental design before we begin? No?"

Kettleburn flipped a lever and the machine hummed back to life. Then, he switched the receiver to his natural hand and started poking at the rooster through the bars with his artificial one. Once it was thoroughly agitated he withdrew, and, sure enough, it let loose with some satisfyingly loud noises.

"Brawk-k-keroo! Kawk! Kuk."

"Well," Kettleburn said, cutting the paper and sticking it up over Pignut's results, "there you have it. Straight as you please—no magic at all. Huh. I think that's enough for today. For next time, I want twenty inches of wild speculation based on our little experiment here."


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Normally Kettleburn would just say "class dismissed!", but under the current safety rules it ended with him escorting the entire class down to the Great Hall for dinner, where Charlie would be stuck unless he managed to convince a prefect or professor to take him elsewhere before the meal was over. It was like being five, and back in primary school.

He met up with the twins at the Gryffindor table.

"Charlie!" The twins suddenly looked up at something behind him. "Why is there . . ." He heard the buzzing of wings, and felt something land on his head.

"Charlie," said George, "there is a naked fairy in your hair."

"Yes, I know."

The twins stared at the top of his head.

"It probably wants someone to pay attention to it," said Charlie, "just, don't laugh at it."